52 pages • 1 hour read
Evelyn WaughBrideshead Revisited
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Decline of the Aristocracy
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to alcohol misuse and religious intolerance.
The British aristocracy faced increasing financial hardships beginning in the middle of the Victorian era, when failures to quickly adapt to a rapidly industrializing society left the centuries-long dependence on their land holdings for income insufficient. This decline became substantially more rapid in the early 20th century. Though a widespread economic boom in the 1920s provided a brief extension to the lifestyle that aristocrats had previously enjoyed, the economic depression that plagued Europe in the 1930s proved the death knell for this previous way of life. Thus, though Waugh refers to Brideshead Revisited as a panegyric (a text published in praise of something), it is simultaneously elegiac, mourning the death of the “country house” lifestyle that Waugh himself became enamored of in his youth.
Yet Brideshead does not merely look at what was lost after the aristocracy’s decline; Book 1 of the novel looks at the last halcyon days of aristocratic grandeur. The idyllic summer that Charles spends with Sebastian after Sebastian breaks a bone in his ankle is characterized by the hedonistic pleasures of aristocratic life, with the two exploring art and wine. Yet even this supposed idyll is not without its darker side, as Sebastian’s alcohol misuse becomes increasingly problematic. The hedonistic pleasures of aristocratic life, the novel suggests, cannot peacefully coexist with modern life, and the characters must find a way to make these pleasures more suitable. Middle-class Charles manages to do this by turning art into his career. Aristocratic Sebastian, on the other hand, is unable to be so pragmatic. His foray into wine eventually devolves into alcohol misuse, showing that hedonistic pleasures, left unchecked, can lead to suffering and decline. Sebastian’s decline symbolizes that of the aristocracy as a whole.
As an outsider to the aristocracy, Charles is better poised to survive this shift. He equates that pastoral summer with youth, a paradigm that the novel echoes. Youth and upper-class lifestyles are both, for Charles, inherently temporary. For Sebastian and the rest of the Flytes, by contrast, the lifestyle of the aristocracy seems eternal: it is a set of privileges their family has possessed for generations. Charles’s relative ease in adapting to its loss is his inherited privilege as a member of the middle class; he does not expect the world to be a way that it no longer is. Yet the novel does not dismiss the seductiveness of the aristocratic lifestyle. Charles’s desire for Sebastian, long cited in scholarly analyses of the text, is not just a desire for Sebastian’s person. It is a desire to be Sebastian as much as it is to be with Sebastian. It is a desire for Sebastian’s way of life.
Charles cannot ever truly access this way of life. His later affair with Julia is a means of being closer to the version of Sebastian that is lost to alcohol misuse, but it is also a way to become closer to Brideshead. He spends years living there with Julia, the house’s ostensible master, only having true ownership slip away at the last moment, when Julia declines to marry him after all. This proximity to aristocracy is thus presented as not quite as dangerous as full membership, insofar as successfully adapting to the mores of modernity goes, but not without its pitfalls. Charles, too, mourns when the aristocracy is lost.
Memory and Nostalgia
Brideshead Revisited is a book about memory, and this preoccupation is baked into the novel’s structure. The novel’s title (“revisited”) and subtitle, which fashion it as a memoir, both reflect this fact, as does the layering of Charles’s stance as narrator. The Charles in the three main books of the novel is a dual character; he is the narrator speaking from the standpoint of the narrative present, which tracks over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, but he is also the narrator who speaks from the stance of the disillusioned 1940s army captain. The second of these narrative voices often interjects on the perspective of the first; he will offer reminders of how things are “now” held against the way they were “then,” perpetually emphasizing that the main timeline of the text is mediated through the memory of an older Charles.
The looping quality to the way Charles recounts his story further underscores the mediated nature of the narrative; he frequently jumps between timelines, following the mood of the text rather than privileging clarity or linearity. The effect of this is to create the impression that Charles is telling a story unplanned, as one might orally tell a narrative; this, in turn, emphasizes the effect of the pseudo-memoir. Yet the formal elements of the novel (the division into prologue and epilogue, into books with smaller chapters therein) prevent any reading that Brideshead is actually posing as true. Instead, a middle ground forms: What happens in the novel is real, but not too real.
This semi-reality blends with the role of memory in the text to develop a pervading sense of nostalgia, characterized as a form of memory that does not necessarily directly align with truth. Nostalgia thus emerges not only as a sentimental form of feeling, but also as a form of sentimental text-building or genre formation. To “revisit” something, in the novel, is not just to recall it, or to report it, but to return in a way that is acutely self-conscious. Nostalgia and memory are both constructed; nostalgia is memory with feeling layered atop it. When Charles comments, therefore, at the beginning of Book 3 that memory is all he has, he does this within the framework of having built himself around memory, to the point of excluding all other points of identification. While the conversion scene in the Epilogue offers a potential balm to this exclusion—Charles finds comfort with being connected to a long history, via God and Catholicism—his recognition of what he lacks in the present (a home, a family, the right to see his children grow up) makes this balm, at best, bittersweet.
Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism
In 1930, Evelyn Waugh converted to Catholicism, despite his Anglican upbringing and irreligious years as a student at Oxford. Though Waugh’s friends and family were surprised by this shift, which they viewed as sudden, Waugh commented that he found life “unintelligible and unendurable without God” (“Come Inside,” first published in The Road to Damascus (1949), ed. John O’Brien. London, W.H. Allen, reprinted in Gallagher (ed.). pp. 366-368). Douglas Patel, a Waugh biographer, cited Brideshead as the first of Waugh’s explicitly Catholic novels, and commented that the author’s newfound religious devotion “[confirmed] his new sense of writerly vocation” (296, Patey, Douglas Lane (1998). The Life of Evelyn Waugh. Oxford, UK: Blackwell).
Brideshead is consumed both with the potential joys of Catholicism and the perils of anti-Catholic prejudice in upper-crust British society. Of all the Catholic characters in the novel, Julia is most materially affected by anti-Catholicism; despite being the shining star of her debutante season, she knows that she will never make an advantageous marriage within the British aristocracy. Eldest sons of aristocratic families would never marry a Catholic, she knows, and second sons can’t either, in case they are called upon to take up their brothers’ positions. The best Julia can hope to do is marry rich, and she does when she weds Rex—even though this marriage costs her much of her Catholic identity, as he is divorced and thus cannot marry in a Catholic church.
Anti-Catholic prejudice does not appear in the text as an ideological concern; it merely speaks to the tension between Catholicism and modernity. The best way forward, the novel suggests, is to disregard this tension. Indeed, the characters with the most religious and least worldly attachments—Brideshead and Cordelia—are the happiest, even if they cannot manage to fully immerse themselves in a life of piety. When Cordelia comments, at the end of Book 2, that she hopes she has a vocation to be a nun, she frames a life of religious service as something that one cannot wholly choose. This vocation is divinely ordained, almost predestined, and ultimately neither Cordelia nor Brideshead have it.
There is, however, in Cordelia’s view, a middle ground. Her characterization of Sebastian’s life on the edges of a religious house is decidedly optimistic, almost idyllic. For Cordelia, proximity to a life of service is an acceptable second-best. Critics have long debated whether the novel supports Cordelia’s vision of Sebastian’s life as a happy one, as a sign of divine grace. Cordelia, however, is certain of it; this certainty lends her a sense of peace that few other characters in the novel get to experience. The novel’s ultimate assessment is that proximity to (Catholic) faith is the best way to withstand the changing tides of history. As Charles’s vision of the past in the final conversion scene connotes, Catholicism (and by extension, the love of a Catholic God) is eternal.
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